Archive for May, 2016

Handscrolls, often fragile and difficult to handle and display because of their large format, are rarely shown in public and in their entirety. These same qualities also makes them impossible to reproduce faithfully for teaching purposes. The Center for the Art of East Asia is hoping to change that by making a few valuable handscrolls more accessible and visible through its Digital Scrolling Paintings Project.
Designed to support the teaching of classes on East Asian painting, the Digital Scrolling Painting Project developed digital scrolling technology to simulate the viewing experience lacking in classes that rely on reproductions which distort the sequential and participatory nature of the handscroll viewing process. In collaboration with the Humanities Computing, the Center for the Art of East Asia developed its digital scrolling technology to simulate the viewing experience and to improve understanding of handscroll paintings. The scrolling paintings website has been designed with interactive elements to allow unprecedented accessibility to the complete works of art for educators, students and researchers.

Viewers can search and browse a selection of scrolls from the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum. the St. Louis Art Museum, the Smart Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Palace Museum of Beijing.

Lamassu, Assyrian winged creature and protective spirit that guarded a gate along Ninevah’s city walls before it was vandalized by ISIS.

the statue of a winged bull at the gates of the ancient city of Nineveh, near Mosul in modern Iraq. It’s one of countless treasures destroyed by vandals, militants or military action in the region in the past 15 years.” So begins the first in a series of stories about lost ancient art from Iraq and Syria.

These stories comprise the Museum of Lost Objects, a 10-part series and podcast produced by the BBC. Museum of Lost Objects follows looted, lost and destroyed antiquities or ancient sites, tracing the local histories, legends, personal stories surrounding Syrian and Iraqi antiquities from their creation to their demise.